We need to think bigger. Having an app on your phone is like having a stranger in your house. The same legal protections that apply to property should apply inside the software that runs on your phone. An app should be at the mercy of the user and should provide easy (and automated) ways to turn off manipulative and surveillance features.
You can invite a person into your house to perform a service for you. They can define conditions on performing their service: "I'll shampoo your carpet for $50." Those conditions could also be "I'll shampoo your carpet every month if you let me read your credit card bill every month." You don't have to agree to this! If you don't want to let them read your credit card bill, you don't have to agree to this service.
If you let someone into your house to shampoo your carpet, without agreeing to let them read your credit card bill, and they secretly do that anyway, that's already illegal!
What you're asking is the equivalent of saying that, if someone has a business of shampooing carpets in exchange for reading people's credit card bills, you want to be legally entitled to invite them into your house and force them to shampoo your carpet anyway, without giving them what they want in exchange.
(incidentally - if you respond to my post by nitpicking details of the analogy instead of addressing the central point, I'm not going to bother to respond).
This is pure fiction though. How many people read an app's ToS? If a carpet cleaner showed up with terms like: "I'll shampoo your carpet every month if you let me read your credit card bill every month." no one would read it before signing either, but I suspect that a court would also consider this contract unenforceable.
In addition, with software "contracts", it's often a case of "give an inch and they'll take the mile". The terms are always open to unilateral change from the vendor. So it's more like: "I'll shampoo your carpet for $50. And I can change the terms to whatever I like at any point in the future." which in itself seems insane.
The tech world does not give you the choice of letting you pay for privacy or pay by invading your privacy. Now, you can nitpick that you can build your own service or host your service, but then the question becomes why is programming/sysadmin knowledge a prerequisite for using your phone?
“Here’s a hypothetical ideal analogy, doesn’t that seem reasonable?” is one of my least-favorite types of arguments in cases where the observable reality is extremely different.
Who cares what it might be like? We can see what it is like.
An app is at the mercy of the user, who can uninstall at any time, just as you can kick out people out of your home, but you can't turn off "manipulative" behaviour for them.
I can let in a contractor in my house and also ask them not to smoke. They of course have the right to refuse that request and decline my money, but in the real world, contractors usually comply with such requests as smoking is known to harm health. I don't see why the digital world has to be any different. Just because laws and awareness are lagging behind, tech world's toxic practices don't need to get a pass.
> They of course have the right to refuse that request and decline my money, but in the real world, contractors usually comply with such requests as smoking is known to harm health.
Right, but you're suggesting that they should legally have to comply with this request and can't refuse service.
Technology cannot solve privacy invasion. A face is only one data point. Skin tone, clothes, your gait etc... all can give away who you are.
What we need is a political framework that will go after privacy thieves. The thieves should face the same kind of consequences as someone who breaks into a billionaire's home.
If all the kids in the peer group have no cell phones, solving the mental health crisis would be easy. As long as some kids have access, the others will feel like they are being deprived of something fundamental, will resent their parents and will look for any opportunity to get on social media.
A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.
Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.
It's not just that. Some kids live in unsafe or car-centric areas, with parents who are uncaring or unable to take them to places where they can socialize in-person. Every kid goes to school, but maybe the kids at school bully them, or maybe the school is too focused on coursework and doesn't dedicate enough time for socialization, or maybe the kid is home-schooled. Especially if a ban were enacted today, some kids spent most of their life on social media, so they might have trouble adapting and socializing in-person.
Personally, I think the most likely and best solution is better social media. Currently, social media is regulated to shield kids from explicit content and predators, but it should also be regulated to shield them from negativity and mindless engagement, and to promote positivity and healthy behaviors (including not spending too much time on it). Recommendation algorithms for kids should be strictly controlled by the government; keep in mind that the government already strictly controls what kids learn in school, and it doesn't have to outright ban "non-explicit harmful" content, just down-weight it enough that kids don't find it without intentionally looking. Plus, a social media with healthier recommendations and discourse may become popular for adults as well, even though they wouldn't be locked into this version like minors (I can imagine a system that requires consent like adult ID but then lets adults stay anonymous, which could be bypassed by dedicated minors, but most wouldn't care enough to do so).
I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
You can use Newpipe (it's open source), and there you may simply subscribe to the channels you want the kid to watch and they'll only watch those channels. There's nothing as home screen there but the kid can still search for a video using a query so it might just be the solution you are looking for.
I want to say this article describes me, but then I realized that it's just my confirmation bias. Who doesn't like to think that they are the smartest ones around and it's everyone else who is stupid and clueless?
Science ultimately is a collective effort. The collaboration doesn't need to happen in real time, in the same physical place. Ideas can be spread out across time and geographies and finally one person puts them together and given our bias for hero worship, we call that one person a genius and go on a wild goose chase of how can we create more geniuses instead of asking how can we foster a environment for ideas, an environment which sometimes needs to last for decades in order to bear fruit.
> First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that.
This would believable if OpenAI charged what it actually costs to run the service instead of using the standard predatory model of subsiding the service, monopolizing market share and then monetizing their monopoly power.
No tech firm should get the benefit of doubt that they are in this to help people. They're in it for money and power at our cost.
Only in the short term. A monopoly is to the disadvantage of consumers, even if they initially benefited from the predatory pricing that allowed that monopoly to take hold.
You'd be right if they had any chance at getting a monopoly, but they don't - there are companies releasing open source models and communities improving on them.
So users get the short term and the long term benefit. Let OpenAI give us their money.
> the Rubik’s cube world record currently stands at 3.13 seconds, set in July 2023.
> However, the record-holder, 23 year-old Max Park, didn’t discover the insights that allowed him to solve the Rubik’s cube. His success was built atop a foundation of accumulated knowledge that mathematicians and puzzle enthusiasts derived—mental algorithms that enable “cubers” to solve the puzzle with lightning speed.
Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual. We tend to build cults of personalities around certain smart people, but if you displace those smart people onto a different time or place, they would have achieved nothing. They owe their success to so many other people.
Having a genius on your team is less important than fostering an environment where a group of people feed off each other's ideas and produce intelligence.
> Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual.
The one question that has kept me up at night the most (can’t recall who posed it) was; “What are we building? Ants build ant hills, beavers build dams, what is humanity building?”
There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite.
So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.
Then let's try something simpler. What were the test scores of Linus Torvalds? Which gatekeeper certified that he was qualified enough to do engineering at the level he has done?
A McKinsey consultant got there through meritocracy, but they will likely be working on something that makes life miserable for people, whereas someone working on an FOSS project will likely make life better for people. As a measure of usefulness to society, meritocracy, as determined by test scores, or career achievements is useless.
But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes? On one hand there is the lived experience of being in the underclass, which might cause someone to be less supportive of tech authoritarianism from the consumer surveillance industry. On the other hand personal benefit fuck-you-got-mine is a strong attractor regardless of someone's past, and I'd think that more "privileged" people could be more independent and better at pulling in a different direction than the overall group behavior.
> But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes?
It won't and that's the point. We should stop wasting our childhoods chasing meaningless standardized tests because the rationale for the tests is built on a lie. You can randomly pick people to run corporations and we won't be any worse off.
Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?
Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own.
One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
> the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth
Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children. That is, the same qualities that make someone more likely to become wealthy are also qualities that promote academic success, not that wealth causes academic success.
> properly fund all public schools
Some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation are funded quite well, and the US nears the top per-student spending around the world[0], well above the OECD average. There is no amount of funding that can supplant parents who value education and a culture that values education.
>Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children.
That just doesn't line up with reality. In the U.S. the vast majority of wealth accumulation is in the form of homeownership [1] — Which has a stark and undeniable racial divide of which we're still seeing consequences today. Specifically racist zoning laws and redlining by banks that refused to give loans to PoC.
A lot of these laws are still being enforced today (i.e. 5,000sqft minimum lot sizes and huge setbacks requiring the purchase of lots of unproductive land that less wealthy people can afford).
Now, during the course of these discussions someone usually brings up a 'model minority' that's succeeding academically, and I'll agree that there's a cultural aspect to this as well. However, if they also own their homes disproportionately to other minorities, they're benefiting from an inequitable system that's still in place.
I'm not trying to reduce anyone's academic success and hard work down to a matter of money, there are lots of successful people despite their obstacles. But we can't pretend the system is setup to reward everyone solely on merit.
The US has a notoriously terrible social safety net compared to peer countries. The "worst-performing public schools" are using their money to provide food, transportation, healthcare, and counseling services in addition to academics.
There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?
Modern society has problems, and they should be addressed. Yet there will always be issues to address, problems to resolve.
Yet these schools exist in one of the freest societies that ever existed, with untold riches in terms of health care, prosperity, and quality of life.
Ask someone from 1800AD about antibiotics, vaccines , cars, computers, electronics and electricity. The advantages of a modern state are astonishing, and all come at the feet of modern universities.
Heck, metoo, the woke movement none of that could have ever existed without decades of courts ruling on the rights of the individual. Quite literally the woke movement's mocked boomer narrative was astonishing, as the woke movement would have never been given room to breath in 1930.
Boomers enabled the woke movement.
We have our society, those that came before us to thank, not belittle. And yes, we have our own things to fix.
I think this hypothesis quickly falls apart when you consider other places other than the US and China. To take India for example, the northern parts rely more on wheat and the southern parts on rice. One could easily make up an argument that the rice dominant south is more individualistic as it produces more economic output.
> To take India for example, the northern parts rely more on wheat and the southern parts on rice. One could easily make up an argument that the rice dominant south is more individualistic as it produces more economic output.
I think that argument would fail due to the assumption that you can infer community's bias towards individualism vs collectivism from "economic output." If you want to turn India into a counterexample, I think you'd need to use similar kinds of psychological tests across the different regions.
The Indian subcontinent has a major confounding variable in the caste system. Different castes have lived side by side with almost no genetic mixing for nearly 2k years. It’s truly anomalous among genetic histories throughout the world.
Presumably those who get to own the Moon will have people here on Earth who they love or care about. Following the "this is just how it is" logic, what's stopping a barrel of gun from being pointed at those people?
That doesn't come up until space is truly independent of Earth, resource wise.
That will be long enough that by the time it happens, they may not have any connections to Earth.
Plus, back on Earth, you have all the normal limitations of the gun barrel. If Nigeria doesn't like what Brazil is doing in space, Nigeria is still going to find it challenging to threaten the Brazilians doing space work with guns.
And to the point being made here, protesters protesting out in front of SpaceX are going to find it challenging to successfully deploy gun-power against them, because the local dominant People with Guns take a very dim view of violating their monopoly... and, likely, SpaceX (here really just any space company) is already acting with their approval.
The net of the complicated web of People with Guns here on Earth still pretty much boils down to the situation I described. Space exploration isn't going to be done by voting or polling, and the Veto of the Merely Loud (among the other vetos) that is so easy on Earth is going to prove quite difficult to project into space. In space, nobody can read your Earth protest sign.
I won't say there's never been a country that has fought for independence while simultaneously needing global trade for 100% of their food and water[0], but there definitely hasn't been a case of a country needing global trade for the literal oxygen they breathe.
Two moons colonies, one that has farms and one that doesn't, I would expect to have very different prospects.
[0] Though I've never heard of such a case, my history isn't good enough to make that claim. And no, mere famine isn't a strong enough example for this, those can be monstrously catastrophic without being existential.
Yes, a space colony would be very unlikely to ever be "fully" independent of Earth. Why would they cut off trade? Surely cutting off relations to Earth would always come with some price.
But, there's prices, and there's prices. Earth history can tell you all about that.
I mean, we're witnessing how this is a continuum and not a binary thing right now, as East and West are decoupling. Will they decouple fully? Doubt it. Will they perhaps recouple someday? Perhaps. Is there a price to this decoupling? Yes, on both sides, but apparently the sides consider it worth it, because it's happening.
Eventually lunar entities might decide they don’t want to just offshore all resources to subsidize earth based companies, and seek or fight for independence from their colonial overlord on earth. There’s plenty of precedent for that on earth, even in the modern era.
